Abstract

The dissertation represents an attempt to construct a coherent and adequate theory of temporality based upon the principles and categories of Justus Buchler's metaphysics of natural complexes. ;Buchler's philosophical perspective has been termed a "radical naturalism." 'Nature' for Buchler refers in an unrestricted manner to "whatever is, in whatever way." Whatever can be discriminated by whatever means, is a "natural complex." Spatio-temporal individuals, literary fictions, physical laws, logical and social relations, are all natural complexes. Since everything that is, is necessarily complex and "whatever is," is related to something else, the notion that something could stand "outside" nature is contradictory. Nature, in Buchler's view, encompasses everything with which it has formerly been contrasted. Nothing is independent of nature, such as "mind": nothing is "beyond" nature, such as God. ;Buchler's concept of natural complex and his principles of ordinality and ontological parity frame a conception of nature that is radically complex and plural. They reflect and contribute to an innovative categorical scheme that represents a fundamental reconstruction of what it means for anything to "be." ;Since, for Buchler, a concept of genuinely ontological scope must be descriptive of whatever is, in whatever way, as such, the concept of time does not function as a category of his metaphysics of natural complexes. That is, time is not fundamental to a description of nature in the unrestricted sense. Though Buchler does not thus provide a systematic treatment of temporality, he has stated that the categories and principles of his ontology are applicable to its analysis. ;The view of time that emerges from my analysis is one which is neither "relational" nor "absolute" in the traditional senses of those terms. 'Temporality', I argue, does not refer to any single "order" of time but to indefinitely many temporal orders describable in terms of the generic features endurance, transition, recurrence, and incipience. These features represent the categories of an "ordinal" metaphysics of temporality. ;In the course of developing a radically naturalistic theory of time, I reject the so-called "B-theory" while I argue for the objectivity of the determinations past, present, and future. Though in this latter respect I agree with Whitehead, ultimately I find his process-oriented view wanting as well, particularly because of an insistence upon the ontological priority of the present